Creeper, All My Friends
Roadrunner Records
Being a Creeper fan and logging on to twitter right after they released All My Friends: the chorus lyric of “all my friends hurt” seems very apt as the timeline erupts with seemingly everyone you follow eulogising about the emotions they’re feeling.
Previous releases Born Cold, Annabelle, and Cyanide have been an introduction to a new side of Creeper, a very cool, very sexy side where they turn from glam-punks into a somehow even more theatrical, suave, invitingly dramatic band. This delicious melodrama is the new era’s answer to the seething intensity of Eternity (In Your Arms), and while All My Friends doesn’t quite live up to the impressive standards set so far, it takes it down to a level that works effectively for a sad banger.
All My Friends strips it back to just Will Gould’s magnetic, gloriously evocative vocals set against Hannah Greenwood’s silky, compelling ones, all atop a subtle piano and the occasional string section. Even the piano consists just of sparse chords, and the string section is so understated it’s more like a back-of-your-mind humming: the focus here truly is the heart-rending lyrics, and it’s impossible not to listen to them and really feel what’s being sung.
If you were touched by I Choose To Live’s “I should have this all worked out at my age” and “now we’re drinking in the park, in our twenties, in our aging skin at dark”, you’ll be hit hard by All My Friends’ “we’re thirty now, we should have thought this through”. Where previous melancholy Creeper tracks Misery, Crickets, and I Choose To Live have ascended to anthem status because of their intensity, All My Friends is comparatively flat. However, this one-levelness exacerbates its gut-emptying blueness. It works perfectly with Creeper’s new aesthetic – if I Choose To Live is screaming into a raging storm, All My Friends is Gould at a piano in an emptying Music Hall as it closes, watched on by despondent whiskey-drinkers and funereally-clad wraiths.
The fourth scene Creeper have shared of the tale of Sex, Death, and the Infinite Void is a promise that this album’s going to tap into every dark corner, and do so with striking aptness. We can’t wait to see what the curtain rises on next.
Sex, Death and the Infinite Void is out July 31st.